Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  In place of spiritual certainty, Lawrence used intuition – the rational ability to compute how events have come about and where they are heading. It was a quality which gave him an air of prescience, and which Clare Sydney Smith would romanticize as ‘the power of foretelling’. Lawrence certainly did not have some magical fortune-telling ability, as Smith envisaged it, for though his intuitions could be staggeringly accurate, they were occasionally dreadfully wrong. Lawrence was adept at selecting and navigating possible paths through the universe, and, as George Lloyd would comment, he had a ‘genius for thinking ahead of nine people out of ten’.9 It was a correct intuition which had told him, long before his latest trip to France, that Crusader castles in Syria would be the inevitable culmination of his planned thesis. It was Charles Bell of the Ashmolean, though, who guided him towards the topic of the pointed arch and vault. It had long been contested as to whether this structure had been adopted from Oriental sources by the Crusaders, or whether the Crusaders themselves had introduced it as an innovation in the East. Lawrence’s knowledge of medieval castles in Britain and France qualified him perfectly for such a study: Bell suggested that he should visit Syria and settle the issue once and for all.10

  Lawrence was now back in his bedroom at Polstead Road, lamenting the loss of his rooms in college and craving a sense of physical separation from the family. He needed ‘quietness’ for his studies, and he persuaded his parents to build him a small cottage at the bottom of the garden, containing a bedroom and a study, piped water, a fireplace and even a telephone to the house. To insulate it doubly against outside noise, Lawrence hung its walls with Bolton sheeting. Vyvyan Richards would often find him there, lying on the hearthrug by a crackling fire, reading his way through a pile of books, or carefully drawing his own foot. Once, Richards startled him in the act of striding up and down along an odd-looking board with nails banged into it. Lawrence explained that he was practising the art of pacing out distances covertly, which would be essential for his next trip if he wished to avoid being arrested as a spy. There are other intimations that he was readying himself for an expedition to the East during the winter of 1908. In October he had begun reading Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, the classic work on Arabia and the Bedu, written by the most distinguished desert explorer of the era – a book which Lawrence would later praise as ‘a bible of its kind’. Its combination of Chaucerian prose and Elizabethan construction appealed to him enormously, since he recognized that Doughty had deliberately set out to purify the English language in the same way that William Morris had done. For Lawrence, stirring adventures and dramatic experiences were of little use unless they were presented in perfect prose, and for this reason he did not admire Richard Burton – possibly the most interesting Orientalist and explorer of the nineteenth century. He condemned the highly-strung, irascible, formidably talented Burton as ‘vulgar’ and dismissed his books as being ‘written in so difficult an English style as to be unreadable’.11 Like Morris’s novels, Arabia Deserta would remain close to his heart for the rest of his life.

  In winter 1908, Lawrence joined the newly formed Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps as a cadet – an act which astonished his peers. The avowed non-conformist, who refused to play organized games ‘because they were organized, because they had rules’, was now voluntarily putting on army uniform, bowing to military discipline and meekly taking orders. The truth may be that the OTC appealed to his masochistic fantasy about military life – not quite as satisfying as being a humble Gunner in the Royal Garrison Artillery, perhaps, but a uniform just the same. The Jesus College contingent was a bicycle-mounted signals unit, which gave him opportunities for cycling, and he considered some of the training to be of real value. He later wrote that he had learned to fire a Vickers machine-gun in the OTC, which was of use to him during the Arab Revolt, though he would tell Liddell Hart that his OTC experience was ‘negligible’ in the sense of teaching him strategy.12 He did practise pistol-shooting assiduously, however, and in December found an opportunity to test his compass-work when he and Scroggs Beeson marched on a bearing from the top of Cumnor Hurst in a snowstorm, wading freezing streams and breasting snowdrifts until they almost fell into the Isis at Folly Bridge.

  This was, in fact, the last day he and Beeson spent in each other’s company, for they had outgrown their friendship. Beeson had forsaken archaeology for zoology, his first interest, leaving Lawrence to archaeologize alone. He became even more deeply involved with the Ash-molean in late 1908, and one day, while visiting the medieval collection, he ran into Edward Leeds, a shy young man eight years his senior, who until recently had been serving in the Colonial Service in Malaya. Leeds had just replaced Leonard Woolley as junior Assistant Keeper of the Ashmolean, and he and Lawrence found much in common – not least their shyness. The following January Leeds introduced Lawrence to the museum’s new Keeper, David Hogarth – a man who was to exert a profound influence on his life. Hogarth was then forty-five years old, an Orientalist and antiquarian of the classical school, who had tramped Syria, Turkey and Palestine alone with a revolver for company, and who stood no nonsense from the natives. He had written a notable book about his adventures: A Wandering Scholar in the Levant, and was an archaeologist of repute who had once run the British School of Archaeology in Athens, and had excavated in Cyprus and in Egypt under the celebrated Flinders Petrie. He spoke French, German, Italian, Greek and Turkish, sat on the committee of the Royal Geographical Society, and had even worked as Times correspondent in Crete during the 1897 revolution. Hogarth was the archetypal Edwardian gentleman-Imperialist: chauvinistic, conservative, autocratic, almost congenitally hostile to democracy – an aristocrat of the intellect. Patrician in style, cool in temperament, superbly educated at Winchester and Magdalen, he was the eternal dilettante amateur, whose qualities Lawrence would later sum up with the single epithet ‘civilized’. Others, less impressed with his combination of physical repugnance and unstymied erudition, thought him a ‘highly educated baboon’.13 Despite his ability, Hogarth never achieved greatness in any one sphere: his talents were too diffuse, and like Lawrence himself, he was too restless to be labelled, always oscillating between the academic and the adventurous, and ultimately leaving his most distinguished legacy in his recognition of remarkable talent in the person of T. E. Lawrence. To Lawrence he was to become a kind of father-figure, a parent-surrogate who ‘was like a reserve, always there behind me; if I got flustered or puzzled’.14 Moreover, Hogarth was well connected. Unlike Thomas Lawrence, who had necessarily broken ties with everyone of influence and could no longer call on the Old School to assist him, Hogarth knew almost everyone. Edwardian society was no meritocracy, and despite his intellectual and academic gifts, Lawrence realized he required some kind of sponsor in order to ‘get on’. He later admitted that he owed Hogarth every good job he had ever had. He was, Lawrence concluded, ‘a very wonderful man … first of all human, then charitable, then alive … the parent I could trust, without qualification, to understand what bothered me’15 (my italics). From the beginning, Lawrence recognized what a man like Hogarth could do for him, and set out to win him over.

  Hogarth was not much interested in Lawrence’s crusader castles. His attitude to any aspect of archaeology unconnected with classical antiquity and the ancient Near East was dismissive. What moved Hogarth was the Hittites, a mysterious biblical people about whom, before 1870, hardly anything had been known. The story of the Hittites was a curious one. In 1812, the Swiss explorer Johan Lutwig Burckhardt had discovered a stone set in the wall of the bazaar of Hama – a large town in Syria – which appeared to be incised with hieroglyphs. He was unable to examine it in detail because of local hostility, but on first glance he felt that the hieroglyphs were quite unlike ancient Egyptian ones. It was not until 1872 that the Hama stone was inspected closely, and then its hieroglyphs were compared with those discovered on a similar stone in Aleppo, and various other inscriptions found scattered over Asia Minor. By 1876, it was c
oncluded that the script of the lost Hittite civilization had been found. Hogarth had already made several major journeys in search of that civilization, and had returned to Oxford with a collection of Hittite cylinder-seals which was unique of its kind in the world. These seals offered tantalizing insights into the lost culture. Of similar shape to the joint of a finger, and rarely much longer, they were incised with intricately made, sometimes surreal images – bloated plants, spiky animals, insect-like humans. Although referred to as ‘seals’, they had originally been printing devices which, when dipped in coloured pigments, could be rolled out to produce designs on human skin or clothing for decoration, or on property to signify ownership. Hittite cylinder-seals had no place in Lawrence’s medieval fantasy, but he flattered Hogarth by showing an interest in them, and by asking where traces of Hittite civilization were likely to be found. He explained that he was planning a trip around crusader castles in Syria the following summer, but could certainly spare a few days hunting for Hittites. Hogarth, unmoved, tried to dissuade him from the journey. It would be far too hot in summer, he said, for tramping about Syria. When Lawrence persisted, Hogarth advised him to contact Doughty, the expert on Arabian travel. Lawrence wrote, but Doughty’s attitude was little more encouraging than Hogarth’s had been. He explained, first of all, that he had been no farther north than Damascus, but added, ‘In July and August the heat is very severe day and night … it is a land of squalor where a European can find evil refreshment. Long daily marches on foot a prudent man who knows the country would I think consider out of the question …’16 If Lawrence really intended visit the East, Doughty commented, he would be well advised to learn Arabic.

  Doughty’s forebodings filled Lawrence with fear, but the more his betters insisted on the foolishness of the undertaking, the more tightly the screw of his determination was turned. His ride through France in 1908 had been the preparation: the East would provide the backdrop for the knight-errant adventures he craved. He began taking Arabic lessons from a Syrian Protestant clergyman, the Revd Nasar Odeh, and from him acquired a sound framework of grammar and a vocabulary of about 100 words which, he thought, would suffice for road directions, food, accommodation, and money transactions. His parents provided £40 to buy a camera and tripod, and to supplement his photographs he took drawing lessons from E. H. New, an architectural illustrator who, to Lawrence’s delight, had recently illustrated a biography of William Morris. Before leaving, he saw Hogarth again, and this time the Master set him a task. Since he would be visiting the region of southern Turkey in which Hogarth had found many of his Hittite cylinder-seals, would Lawrence bring back more seals for the Ash-molean collection? The seals were small and easily transportable. Lawrence now had his quest. To prepare himself practically for local conditions, he memorized long passages from Arabia Deserta and read Practical Hints for Travellers in the Near East by E. A. Reynolds-Ball. He took Ball’s advice and bought a Mauser automatic pistol for protection against footpads. He had a lightweight suit made with many pockets to carry his things, and through Hogarth met Harry Pirie-Gordon, who had travelled in Syria the previous season, and from whom he managed to borrow an annotated map. Meanwhile, his official iradeh – a letter of safe-conduct from the Ottoman Government – had been applied for by Sir John Rhys, Principal of Jesus College, through Lord Curzon, Chancellor of Oxford University. On 18 June 1909, with Pirie-Gordon’s map stuffed into one pocket and his Baedeker stuffed into another, he stepped aboard SS Mongolia, bound for Port Said and, ultimately, Beirut.

  Beirut was then one of the most vibrant cities in the Middle East: Lawrence himself characterized it as ‘the door to Syria, a chromatic Levantine screen through which … foreign influences entered …’17 When I arrived there in his footsteps, ninety years on, however, it was a shell of a place, its famous ‘Downtown’ quarter reduced to rubble – a maze of shell-shocked buildings without interiors or roofs. Though the war between Muslims and Christians had long since ceased and Israeli troops had pulled out of the city, they were still fighting the Palestinians in southern Lebanon, which made it impossible for me to follow that part of Lawrence’s 1909 route. Instead I had to approach it indirectly, taking a bus from Cairo to Jerusalem and up the Jordan valley to Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, where I found a room in the Church of Scotland Hostel. The verandah of my cell-like room looked into a private beach-garden full of spruce and cypress and old eucalypts. There were glowering clouds over the lake, a ponderously spinning carousel casting beams of light on the embroiled waters. Gulls and shearwaters rose and fell on the waves like paper boats. Lawrence had found the lake ‘very blue and always moving: never quite calm’, but ‘pretty’ rather than ‘grand’.18 He described Tiberias itself as a ‘hot and dirty’ town, but found it not altogether unpicturesque: he loved its tiny port and fishing-boats, and thought its ruined walls ‘interesting’. The walls were still there, but their effect was spoiled by the dozen great ziggurats of modern hotels which towered over them.

  The following day I hired a mountain bike to ride up to Safed, the highest town in Galilee, where Lawrence had spent a few days. It had rained in the night. The road along the lakeside through Magdala was wet and the wheels sprayed a rash of mud over my oilskin jacket. I climbed painfully above Capernaum, around an endless series of hairpins, through green meadows full of grey boulders, fat, grazing cows and elegant white egrets. At Rosh Pinna, the air was thick with mist and the road darkened by avenues of stone-pines. I halted to drink coffee at a papershop-cum-café, where a very fat man – the proprietor of the place – was sitting at a table reading the sports page of a Hebrew newspaper. He seemed interested in my search for Lawrence. ‘Lawrence was a friend of the Jews,’ he told me. ‘He believed in Israel as a National Homeland for us. We will never forget him for that!’ This was essentially true, I thought. Like many Britons of his day, Lawrence had been excited by the idea of restoring the Jews to their ancestral homeland after 2,000 years: the British had seen themselves as secret guardians of time, capable of using their vast wealth and power to replay history. On his first journey through Galilee in 1909, indeed, Lawrence had been disappointed to find the country derelict by comparison with the image he had formed of it through his biblical study. Instead of the ‘polished streets, pillared houses and rococo baths’ he had imagined, he found a place of ‘dilapidated Bedu tents, with the people calling to [one] to come in and talk, while miserable curs came snapping at [one’s] heels’.19 There is little trace here of the later Arabophile. He believed that Palestine had been a ‘decent’ country in Roman times and could be made so again: ‘The sooner the Jews farm it all the better,’ he wrote. ‘Their colonies are bright spots in the desert.’20

  From Rosh Pinna, I rode up into ice-cold mist which settled over the hills like a blanket, and the pedalling became agony. Headlights loomed out of the fog at regular intervals, like demonic eyes. Occasionally a waft of wind pushed the mist on, and there were momentary glimpses of the country below, a magical, sunlit country of hills and fields. I had never imagined that the road to Safed would ascend so relentlessly for all of its 2,700 feet: at times it seemed that I was pedalling all the way up to heaven. I had been cycling upwards in first gear for almost five solid hours, and my calves were screaming, when the mist suddenly cleared and I saw Safed, a large town spread round the skirts of five or six peaks. As I rode into the centre, rain came bucketing down through the eucalyptus groves. There seemed to be no sign of the crusader castle. I stopped an old man to ask directions. He was friendly enough, but shook his head: ‘No English! No Hebrew! No Arabic! Only Yiddish!’ he said. Safed was a place of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Why should they be interested in crusader castles? There was only one history for them. I never did find the castle, but I was content enough with the stunning view I had of Mount Hermon, when the rain peeled back the last skeins of mist.